The demand for digital video products continues to increase. Some examples of applications for digital video include video communication, security and surveillance, industrial automation, and entertainment (e.g., DV, HDTV, satellite TV, set-top boxes, Internet video streaming, digital cameras, cellular telephones, video jukeboxes, high-end displays, and personal video recorders). Further, video applications are becoming increasingly mobile as a result of higher computation power in handsets, advances in battery technology, and high-speed wireless connectivity.
Video compression is an essential enabler for digital video products. However, performing video compression may require significant computation and external memory bandwidth for acceptable performance. The external memory bandwidth requirement may be a performance bottleneck, especially in high-definition video coding and decoding in embedded systems. Motion prediction and motion compensation, an integral part of many current video compression standards, have the highest requirements for external memory bandwidth due to repeated and random accesses to reference frames stored in external memory. Accordingly, techniques for reducing external memory bandwidth requirements for motion prediction and motion compensation are needed.